


intrusive thot

by bogbats



Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Dom/sub Undertones, F/M, Face-Stepping, Stepping kink, Uneasy Allies, Verbal Humiliation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-03
Updated: 2018-09-03
Packaged: 2019-07-06 06:38:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15880596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bogbats/pseuds/bogbats
Summary: “So… what other sleazy things are you into?” She’d check for herself, but it’s actually a hundred times better watching Leland shift uncomfortably beneath her heel, supplicant, starting to turn red. She doesn’t even need to know anything else. “Are you hoping you’ll get to, I don’t know, lick my boots or something?”A witch and a witch hunter work through some... issues. Kind of.





	intrusive thot

They crash into the wall. The boards creak behind flaking wallpaper, threatening to give, sprinkling dust and plaster onto her shoulders, but trashing Leland’s hovel of an apartment is just about rock bottom on Shura’s list of concerns. Leland’s leather-clad hand is twisted in the hair at the nape of her neck as he tries to cover her, which infuriates her in a way she normally doesn’t _get_ , even though he hasn’t yanked hard enough yet to properly hurt. It just feels like he’s trying to leash her, is all.

“Would you quit—” She curls her fingers around his wrists and cuts her nails in. “Stop grabbing me like I’m an animal.”

A solid outward yank is all it takes—he’s shorter and _she’s_ stronger—Leland grunts, snapping his hands around to escape the grip before she can turn it on him. It’s been back and forth like this for a while now, but eventually she’s going to get the upper hand and keep it. 

His lip is still bleeding, she notices with grim satisfaction, and tongues her teeth. 

“Stop acting like you’re entitled to threaten anyone you like if it suits you,” he pants into the hot space between their mouths. “See? We can both make demands.”

“I’m not—what, I’m not making demands; this isn’t some unreasonable thing I’m trying to force out of you.” Shura sounds awestruck even to her own ears.

A slight furrow appears between Leland’s brows when she says that, turning into this ragged, half-beat of a truce between them, before he shuts down whatever second thought he’s having and he’s grasping at her sides through all the layers of fabric she wears. Shura gets her fingers up under his jaw and starts pushing his head back.

“What’s your problem, anyway?” she grunts as he relents to stumbling backwards. “You’ll threaten children who haven’t done anything wrong except try and survive, but witchfinders who use magic you guys aren’t supposed to have or act as spies—that’s fine with you?”

His thumb digs between her ribs, hard. Fair; touched a nerve. It’s not that she even has anything against Margeaux, either, besides the mekhania eye and Remus Sinclair—what bothers her is Leland. Not Leland’s moral quandaries and his twisted-up distress about any of those things, just Leland in general, as a person. She wants those nerves touched just so he’ll be too busy trying to cover them up again to do anything else for a while.

“I’ve said already,” he says in a chilly undertone, “I have no desire to harm children, but there are better witchfinders than me who might see fit to hunt them anyway.”

Her mouth fills with a sour taste. “That’s your idea of ‘better’?” She makes sure to sound scathing.

Without being able to properly see his expression, she has to guess how scalded he is. His fingers had twitched against her when she said it, so at least scalded enough to react.

“Contrary to your belief, I am not the worst witchfinder to come out of the academy.” Leland sets his jaw and pushes back against her, regardless of how hard she digs into the tender undersides or the bruises that he’ll end up with.

“I don’t believe that,” she says without giving herself time to think it over; she has to worry about this now. “I don’t care about you enough to believe you’re the best or worst of anything.”

She thinks she sees Leland roll his eyes. “Good for you,” he sighs, and, clapping his hands ‘round her forearms, jerks backwards with her through the doorway.

Like the scuffle that brought them here in the first place, Shura loses most of it to the adrenaline. She catches glimpses, but they’re mostly fragments: Leland’s attempts to pin her down long enough to subdue her and his feral, shaken grin every time they come close and tight enough to kiss but don’t—she’d lost all interest in that the instant he’d opened his mouth, and she’d guess the same goes for him, too, because neither of them move to do it, just pant into the space between and then struggle on.

So it goes, until they’re both beginning to flag, and Shura considers it for a half-second, does the mental equivalent of a shrug, and reaches into his brain. 

It’s a haze of not-quite-coherent images, most of them useless—about what she’d expected from him, especially in the middle of _this_ , except as she mentally thumbs through Leland’s dirty laundry (an empty apartment, Szerena's statue absolutely riddled with icicles, a distaste for his situation that’s obvious to her with or without magic), she stumbles onto one thing she can’t so easily glance off of.

What Leland is thinking about, what Leland wants the most, right now, as she wrestles him back into the sharp edge of the table—and so _shudderingly_ badly that it’s honestly a little embarrassing for him—is for her to step on him. Not, like, on his toes as she’s walking by. On his face, or at least on parts of him he’d have to be prostrate for her to reach. Whatever other intent he’d had with this scuffle doesn’t even make a close second. She must be looking at him funny now because his eyes narrow, then dart down to the loosening grip she has in his collar. 

He hooks a foot behind her and smashes his elbow down into the crook of her arm, and as it buckles he twists around her, switching their places. Leland’s splayed palm on her belly keeps her from getting winded on that same edge when he pushes her into it, and though it’s not like he’s really touching anything weird by doing that, he’s still _touching_ her.

Shura stops struggling, and at least she can hand it to him that he’s got the sense of mind to stop fighting something that isn’t fighting him back. He’s hot against her, every limb strung tense, the both of them cats jumping at every sound. She lets her palms go slack on the tabletop.

“Wow, Leland,” Shura comments, feeling abruptly as bland as she sounds. “That sure is someplace for a witchfinder to want to be.”

It’s like an electric charge misses her but goes straight through him. “What?”

Experimentally, she tests her weight against his hand; he doesn’t let her get far, though it’s not like she could anyway, not without restarting the fight, pinned between his body and the table. “You know, just… seeing as this whole time, you’ve been pretty clear about where I’d be if the academy hadn’t blown up.”

As far as the way they’re handling each other, and have been handling each other, he wants to kill her. It’s not even that she thinks he doesn’t, because that’s basically the only vibe she gets from him. But there’s also that foggy desire, too, laid out across the surface of his thoughts like pond scum.

In the drone of Leland’s prolonged silence, Shura hears herself start talking some more, voice getting steadier the longer she goes and the longer Leland doesn’t say or do anything in return. “I mean, isn’t your whole life built around killing innocent people because the Clementia says so? Where does having their boots all over your face fit in?”

The temperature of the room seems to drop several degrees.

Finally, very quietly, Leland goes, “Where did you get that from?”

He gives her more than long enough to answer, must be hoping she’ll give him one if he does. Then he whirls her, and the only reason he can is because she doesn’t bother making it hard for him to get a grip and do it. 

As she’s shoved into the table again, this time facing him, feet half-knocked out from her under, she resolves to meet the furious gaze he gives her more and more frequently, but instead of angry, Leland just looks—dumbstruck. His right eye, the real eye, gleams with an uncanny, almost uneasy, intent.

“Where did you get that from?” he asks again, even softer than before.

Maybe she shouldn’t have said anything. Too late now. Shura licks her lips and glances past him towards the front door, still ajar, then back. “Don’t worry about it,” she says, without blinking.

He’s been a witchfinder long enough to comfortably throw the title around. He can figure it out on his own time.

Frowning, Leland opens his hands and takes a step away from her. She tries not to watch the gears in his eye click and rotate. She also tries to straighten up without giving him the idea of yanking her back down again. And suddenly he’s grinning widely, not pleasantly, not the smile of someone who wants to be smiling. The swordcane he’s always carrying around with him audibly cuts the air as he swings it and rests all his weight on his palm on the pommel. 

“Shura, darling,” he says, showing too many teeth, “have you made it a habit to go snooping around in peoples’ minds?”

“Let’s take a moment and talk about this,” she suggests, and, seeing him shoot an automatic, irritated look toward his single chair, adds, “No, the floor is fine.”

To his credit, he’s starting to catch on to her tricks. Reacts faster than some might. Just… not fast enough. 

A muscle works in his jaw and he flexes a hand towards her, but then Leland goes down as though an invisible force has struck him quick and clean behind the knees, landing hard on his elbow as he halfway manages to resist the pressure to just _drop_. He hisses and lays sprawled out where he fell, pinned by the spell. 

For now.

“You—”

“Me? Oh, I’m good, actually. I’ll stand.”

She makes sure to do so right beside him.

Leland has a look on his face like he’s not sure which he wants to do more: break his blade across her shins or lie there and wait. He must settle on the latter, because apart from a perfunctory jerk of his hand towards the cane, he doesn’t move.

“Shura.” 

And Shura watches the interesting way his expression shifts as the sole of her shoe bears down on his jaw, pinning his cheek to the floor. It’s his mekhania eye closest to her, but the rest of Leland’s face is still real enough that Shura can clearly see the pleasure-pained furrow that suddenly pinches his brow. Kind of a shame, really. It’s better when he’s just miserable.

“Gross,” she comments.

Leland’s hand snaps up whipcord-fast and wraps around her ankle. Doesn’t yank her anywhere, just holds on. “Let’s neither of us play at being paragons of moral fibre,” he says in rasp.

“Maybe not, but…” Shura makes to grind down and finds that he lets her do it. Or at least, his arm doesn’t string up tense and resist it until she’s put _just_ enough weight behind it to hurt. “I’m a better person than you,” she says, simply.

That’s fact rather than opinion, so she’s pleased when he doesn’t try making it a point of contention. What he does do is laugh like laughter is something she has forced from him at knifepoint, and he squeezes her Achilles tendon through her boot.

“What, all this shit just to insult me? You do that anyway.”

“I don’t know, Leland,” she says, putting a butter-won’t-melt-in-her-mouth stress on his name, “from where I’m standing, it seems like you actually kind of like it.”

Leland’s other hand spasms at his side and digs into the musty floorboards. Probably he’s thinking about strangling her, since he’s acted like he’d like to before.

Except he absolutely won’t. Not so long as Shura’s promising to treat him the same as the public treats the paths outside Mountebank’s.

“So… what other sleazy things are you into?” She’d check for herself, but it’s actually a hundred times better watching Leland shift uncomfortably beneath her heel, supplicant, starting to turn red. She doesn’t even need to know anything else. “Are you hoping you’ll get to, I don’t know, lick my boots or something?”

The thought that he actually _might be_ makes her lip curl.

But Leland’s mechanical eye swivels towards her now, so fast she hears the whirring of the gears. “Don’t demean me,” he says through a brittle smile, with about as much friendliness as he normally speaks to her with.

Mm. Like he hasn’t got that on lock all on his own.

In the manner of explaining something very simple to someone very stupid, Shura says, “I haven’t done anything you didn’t want,” and presses down with her toe. Demonstratively. “If you’re feeling demeaned, it’s probably because you wanted that, too.”

As she pushes down, he makes a strangled sound and his whole back straightens. The unpleasant feeling of Leland lifting on her heel and adjusting the pressure she places on him creeps up her leg and goes to settle at the base of her spine. In counterpoint, almost. What a pathetic sight, though. The witchfinder getting hot on being under a witch’s worn-out shoe.

“Honestly,”—as casual as discussing the weather; see, he doesn’t have to know how hard she has to work to make it seem that way—“if this is what gets you going, I dunno, there’s probably at least one brothel around here with someone willing to play out a witchfucker fantasy.”

‘Around here’ meaning the residences near the witchfinder academy. Implied: the places where the witchfinders who get off to those fantasies live. Witchfinders like him. She doesn’t feel it, but she can see Leland’s throat bob as he swallows. It almost makes having said ‘witchfucker’ palatable. Almost.

“You can tell me the truth, Leland.” He doesn’t adjust her this time. “Can’t afford it? Hated yourself too much to ask? Wait, no, I have a better one—it’s not as good if the magic doesn’t come from a real witch.”

This is just dancing on the edge of the knife for the sake of it. Anyone could tell her and she’d agree without batting an eye: there’s nothing preventing him from killing her, not really. She’s sure Tessaly hasn’t spared a thought towards her since handing her off to them (if she’d even spared a thought towards her then), and she’s going to die anyway. Even if the Clementia has put a pin in that particular footnote for now, there’s nothing stopping Leland. If he decided to, the Clementia would calmly sweep it under the rug. The same as every other time.

Right now, the look he’s giving her says he’s deciding.

She stays completely still, barely even breathing, until the moment passes. 

It takes a minute. Maybe two? The far-off sound of a heated argument drifts through from outside, while Leland’s chest slowly rises and falls and she stands toe-to-toe with his unblinking stare. Finally, from the corner of her eye, she sees his other hand minutely pull towards himself, and she’s not sure, but she figures she can guess one of two things he likely wants to do. 

“Hey, no,” she snaps, sharp with alarm. “You don’t get to do that here.”

Leland makes a noise of vexation and rakes that hand into his hair instead. “This is _my_ house, you wretched woman—”

Shura yanks her foot back as though scalded. “That’s not what I mean. I mean you don’t get to do that here, you don’t get to act like you’re the one in control right now, in this whole… situation. You’re not. I am.”

Where did that come from?

She realizes she’s shuddering a little, hands clutched in front of her just in case he decides to grab her shawl and pull. She doesn’t like Leland—no, she really hates him, actually, more than she’s hated just about anyone. But she doesn’t hate this. There are a lot of things out there worse than this. 

He’s staring at her, now, barely moving.

A _lot_ of things.

“So—ask me to step on you.”

That makes him freeze completely, and Shura can relax a bit. “Excuse me?”

“If you want it so bad, ask me to step on you. Maybe I’ll do it.” She shrugs widely. Like before, it gets easier the longer she talks. “You won’t know unless you try.”

And Leland—breathing hard, red in the ears—just stares, the corner of his mouth frozen in a rictus grin. His real eye is feverishly bright, unblinking. Finally, he loosens the clenched fist he’d made in his own hair and lets it drop back to the floor, where it splays out tense.

“Alright,” he says, venomously, but pleasure-pained again. “Alright.” And like he’s at his death knell, he takes this long, tenuous breath before muttering, “Step on me, Shura. Just a little.”

Just like that. 

Incredible.

“Wow,” she says, but drops her foot low onto his stomach anyway. Feels the muscles clench in anticipation of it being a proper kick. Tempting, especially when he’s already begging at her feet like the dog he is—to be honest, though, this feels a bit better than hurting him would.

And almost immediately, he wraps his hand around her ankle again. On instinct, Shura tenses, but again, he doesn’t yank her anywhere. He just holds on.

“Hey, Leland…” And all she has to do to make him flinch is say his name, anyway. “I wonder what everyone else would think if they saw you like this.”

“Nothing they wouldn’t also think about you,” he grinds out, but it’s got no heft. 

Yeah, no, what this says about him and what it says about her aren’t at all comparable. And he knows it.

When she doesn’t deign to tell him as much, his right hand comes to join the left in circling her leg, the movement so sharp and sudden that her first instinct is to assume he’s finally going to shove her off or snap the bone. But even as she shifts her weight in anticipation of some kind of pain, he just applies a slow, trembling pressure. It pushes towards her, not to the side, urging the thinning sole of her boot down between his—oh.

“Oh.”

 _Oh,_ barely above a murmur. Leland exhales hard and gives her a strained look that’s half-challenge and half-plea. 

“Shura.” 

In Leland-speak, that has to be equivalent to pleading.

Lips silently moving, just nonsense words for just—a completely insane situation, she pulls her foot back until she isn’t stepping on him at all anymore, standing instead in the tight V at the join of his legs. He watches like a frantic, caged animal, fingers flexed at his sides, each breath a sharp unsteady flare of what she hopes to be self-loathing.

“It must have been a great night when you realized you’re all about getting degraded by the people you kill.” She—somehow—manages a conversational tone, to which Leland’s lips draw back in a sneer that would hold up better if he weren’t trembling with the effort of staying still.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” he pants. “It’s not _witches_.”

Shura rolls the toe of her boot into his groin and one of Leland’s legs draws up a little. “Feels like it’s witches.”

Though it’s still dulled, through the softer leather, she gets a better idea of the heat and the hardness that she’s worked him into. He’s covering his eyes with the heels of both hands, shoulders taut with the strain of taking so much of his body’s weight. Shura’s heart beats faster and harder and higher in her chest, not with any kind of arousal, just relief at having ripped Leland so far open that all he can do—all he _wants_ to do—is lie here and beg to rut against her boot.

“Just—stop talking.” Leland’s cheeks look as though someone’s slapped him. 

She drags her foot up until it brushes his belt buckle—“Why? Am I embarrassing you?”—and down to the floor again.

“I’m not,” he starts, but the rest breaks off into a bruised noise, heels scuffing the floor as he rocks his weight. If Leland weren’t Leland, the sight of it might do something for her besides staple on a floaty, detached satisfaction over top of the nerves.

“Well, you should be.” 

Shura pushes at the knee that’s risen up alongside her and repeats the drag, harder this time; Leland lets his legs fall open, unresisting, gloved fingers twitching into his hairline. He’s making sounds, now, soft and staccato, every time she works her heel into him.

Now it’s hard even for her to speak. “How does this feel? I mean _really_.”

Leland jerks his chin back as though the words are a physical blow, slinging an arm across his face—in the moment where nothing covers his eyes, she sees them half-closed, staring hazy and despairing at the ceiling. It figures he’d clam up now.

“Are you even going to stop yourself, or do you seriously want me to keep going with this?”

What feels like—stars, it could be a full _minute_ and she wouldn’t know any better, it just drags in this ghastly silence where the only real sound is Leland’s shaky breathing getting thinner, sharper. Shura isn’t sure she can look at him anymore so much as through him. Well, not until he nods minutely into the crook of his own arm and the reality of that drags her back screaming.

She recoils.

“Stars, Leland.” She’s unsettled even to her own ears. Two full steps of rapid-fire backpedaling yank her away from him before she can even formulate the desire for it to happen. “Forget that, how does it feel to know you’re even lower than the ground I walk on?”

Leland makes a motion like he’s going to sit up but thinks better of it. He croaks, “…Don’t,” but whatever it is he doesn’t want her doing, Shura… honestly doesn’t care. She keeps on backpedaling until the door hits her back in the same spot he’d made the table hit.

“And you figure you have the right to kill people,” she laughs. Her face is so, so uncomfortably warm. “It doesn’t even matter if they deserve it, because you… you’re no better than any of them, in any way. How much do you hate yourself? Really.”

Now he finally lets his arm drop, sliding weakly to the floor above his head, open palm towards the ceiling. His face, when he tilts it towards her, is flushed and his brow speckled with sweat, but the worst thing about him is the eyes. They’re awful.

“That’s not what this is,” he says, with effort, and painfully hoarse, making him sound like something invisible is in the process of strangling him.

Shura feels her stomach turn. “I think it is,” she says, and leaves him there.

**Author's Note:**

> They're better friends now.


End file.
